At our company, we process a lot of requests on the leading gift cards and coupons websites in the world. The senior developers had a meeting in late October to discuss working on a solution to replicate the MySQL functions of AES_ENCRYPT and AES_DECRYPT in the language of PHP. This article centers on what was produced by senior developer Derek Woods and how to use it in your own applications.

He starts with a little bit of backstory - why to even bother using encryption, what AES encryption is and why you should probably avoid using the MySQL implementation of it in your apps. PHP's mcrypt functions don't return the same hashes as their MySQL counterparts (he includes the "why" of this) and includes some quick code to replicate the MySQL behavior. He also mentions some issues with the transformation, newlines and shows the source for their completed "aes_crypt" and "aes_decrypt" functions.